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Gogo's latest: texting and calling on airplanes

I'm 25,000 above ground, texting in real time and making calls. And I'm doing so on my own iPhone 5, as well as a Google Nexus 5. This aerial feat is made possible through Gogo's Text & Talk technology, which

I'm 25,000 above ground, texting in real time and making calls. And I'm doing so on my own iPhone 5, as well as a Google Nexus 5.

This aerial feat is made possible through Gogo's Text & Talk technology, which the company hopes will take off on passenger airlines during the first quarter of 2014. Gogo recently unleashed a similar service for some of its business aviation customers.

Frequent travelers know Gogo as a major provider of fee-based Wi-Fi and digital entertainment inflight services. Its services are currently available on more than 2,000 planes across nine domestic U.S. air carriers plus Japan Airlines.

I was invited with a small group of journalists onto the company's test jet Friday morning to sample the latest service—our flight took off from Newark Airport and lasted a little over an hour as it flew high above New York State and Connecticut.

Prior to boarding I downloaded the Gogo Text & Talk app onto the two smartphones that I used to exploit the service; by the time the service formally launches next year, you'll be able to fetch the app from Apple's App Store or the Google Play store.

Through the app, you can dial or send or receive texts in a fashion similar to how you already make calls and text on the phone. You can summon a dialing pad, or tap contacts names or the names inside "recents" caller lists. And with a nod toward international travelers, the company points out that you can do all this on your phone in your native language.

As with regular texts sent from the ground, you can review the conversation later on.

During my in-flight test, texting worked much better than phone calling did. The plane was noisy. I had difficulty hearing my daughter at the other end. Another person I talked to said the audio was rather weak, comparable to the quality of calls sometimes made from my coverage-challenged basement home office.

Gogo's test jet.(Photo: Ed Baig, USA TODAY)

Still, I was able to actually conduct a couple of conversations, and I fared better with voice on the iPhone than on the Nexus—the Nexus call dropped off almost immediately. Gogo executive Brad Jaehn explained during the flight that the Android app is in an earlier stage than its iOS counterpart.

And all things considered the technology demonstration was impressive, especially considering that in this particular set-up we were told that only two passengers were really meant to be on a call at any one time; best I could tell most of us were gabbing at once. Presumably once voice calling is ready for primetime, the technology would be able to accommodate a planeload of passengers.

That's a scary proposition to some, the idea that your cabin will be full of loquacious loudmouths. Fortunately, the voice part of the Text & Talk initiative seems a ways off, at least in the U.S. "Currently in North America our nine airlines partners have no interest in enabling voice calls because of the social stigma that it ultimately introduces," Jaehn says. But Gogo says there is demand for such calling services on international flights.

There certainly appears to be an appetite for the texting part — Gogo's own research suggests that 79% of flyers want inflight texting.

According to the company, the Text & Talk application serves as an extension of a GSM or CDMA cellular network, without the need to install "picocells," the small cellular stations planes have used to deliver similar services. The result is that smartphone users could roam onto Gogo's in-flight Wi-Fi system as if they were roaming onto a land-based cellular network.

The company hasn't indicated how much Text & Talk might cost, with each airline partner possibly pricing the service differently. It doesn't seem likely however that Text & Talk will be bundled with Gogo's regular inflight Wi-Fi service, which nowadays is sold in a variety of daily, monthly and annual fee packages.

Text & Talk arrives at a time when the government is finally relaxing restrictions on the use of electronic devices during takeoff and landing. But Gogo's service doesn't actually kick in until the plane climbs above 10,000 feet. Who'd want to pay Gogo from the ground anyway when you can still in all likelihood stay connected for free?